Did John Brown fail?
John Brown began the war that ended American slavery and made this a free Republic.” – Frederick Douglass Background: The late 1840s and 1850s were a turbulent and complex time in American history as the country ground inexorably toward Civil War. Abolitionist and pro-slavery positions hardened both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line as events built toward a bloody confrontation. John Brown would be the catalyst that triggered the violent reaction. “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.” As David W. Blight says in his review of David S. Reynolds’s new book on John Brown, “John Brown did not make it easy for people to love him – until he died on the gallows. Perhaps no other figure in American experience straddles the blurred line between myth and history, legend and reality, quite like the domineering, violen
